


On Dry(ish) Land

by I_hate_usernames



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emphasis on the hurt part, Hawaiian Hunk (Voltron), Hunk & Lance (Voltron) Friendship, Hunk (Voltron) is so Pure, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, I'm basically torturing Lance but there isn't other people torturing Lance so it isn't torture?, Lance (Voltron) is a Mess, Mer!Lance, Merman Lance, Rescue, Torture, Trapped, Warning: Don't Get Attached To This Fic, best bro hunk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 11:26:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9321398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_hate_usernames/pseuds/I_hate_usernames
Summary: Lance was definitely one of the top swimmers in the ocean. He wasn’t the largest or the strongest but he was the fastest. It made him a bit cocky that he had never lost a race. Which was why, he was left totally unguard when he suddenly couldn’t control where he was going.Lance is a merman who gets caught up in a tsunami and ends up trapped in a hole on the shore with cruel sun shining down on him. He's almost positive that he would die - that is, until Hunk shows up. But the rescue isn't just that simple with the hole being really deep and way off the shore. Well if Lance's going to die here, at least he found a friend to see him off?





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter is really really short and it's just you know, vague story as to how Lance ends up where he ends up.

Merpeople were the most powerful and fastest swimmers of the sea. Which was one of the reasons that they had been able to mostly stay as a secret. No wave was strong enough to wind them down. No fish was as quick as them, merpeople were the ultimate enemy below the waters as were people on dry land. The only ones higher up the food chain were, in fact, the people who walked on land on two feet. Not because of measure of strength (let’s face it, a merperson could easily drown a land person) but because of the terrifying amount of more or less necessarily killing they did compared to merpeople.

 

Lance was definitely one of the top swimmers in the ocean. He wasn’t the largest or the strongest but he was the fastest. It made him a bit cocky that he had never lost a race. Which was why, he was left totally unguard when he suddenly  _ couldn’t  _ control where he was going.

 

No wave strong enough to wind down a merperson, huh? Well maybe one large ass tsunami just maybe could do the trick if the merman just happened to be at the point of the strongest current a bit too near the surface.

 

Which Lance had been.

 

Never in his life had he felt that kind of pressure and washing machine like whirling. He couldn’t tell which way the bottom of the sea was. The strength of the water pressed down against him and he couldn’t move against it no matter how much he tried. He was helpless.

 

Lance had never in his life really experienced falling. 

 

Wait - no he had. Sometimes he liked to swim as fast as he could to the surface and jump several feet up into the air, which would result him falling after of course.

 

But Lance had never in his life experienced falling like this. Without control or knowledge just what would wait for him at down bellow. There was water all around him but they were just droplets and he was, in fact, in the air.

 

It didn’t even take that long to hit the ground - just mere few seconds. But it felt like forever. And after it was over and Lance really had finally hit the ground - oh boy did he wish that he hadn’t.

 

There was some water to land on, but those few feet didn’t soften the blow nearly enough since the ground met him almost instantly. It hurt. It was hard, it hit him like a ton of rocks. It scratched his smooth skin and even ripped away some of his softer scales. Lance wasn’t used to ever getting hurt like this and so, even if the fall didn’t cause life threatening injuries, the pain was just enough to make his exhausted body and mind to black out.

 


	2. Trapped

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance being miserable, really really miserable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning!** I'm basically torturing Lance in this chapter very very explicitly. **Proceed with caution?**

Lance woke up to unbearable heat and dryness with his whole body sore. Once he blinked his eyes open, he had to shut the tightly back since the light was  _ so bright _ . It was unnatural. It burned. It even shone trough his eyelids.

 

And God, was it hot. His lips were dry and chapped. His upper body felt like it was burning. His lungs felt like someone had shoved sand down his throat.

 

Wait - his lungs?! 

 

Lance’s eye snapped open again and he immediately lifted his hand to cover from the still torturous light. It took awhile for him to see something else but white light but slowly his vision started to pick up blurry shapes and muted colors until he was able to focus enough to see his own tail. His own beautiful blue tail in a very shallow pool of water.

 

He could feel his heart beating faster as he took more and more of his surroundings in. The fact that there was long and steep, downright horizontal, walls all around him. The fact that the bottom of the hole he was trapped in had only like 15 inches of water. The fact that the opening of the hole was completely open and an unforgiving sun was shining on him straight from above. The fact that the hole wasn’t even big enough for him to properly spread out in his full-length. The fact that his upper body was above waters and the horrible feeling in his chest was because he was breathing with his lungs instead of his gills. The fact that he was utterly and completely trapped in this place.

 

Lance could feel his breathing come quicker and quicker as panic settled in. It made the burning in his lungs even worse.  _ Calm down _ .  _ Calm down _ .  _ Breathe slowly, ease into it _ . God, he hadn’t breathed with his lungs in  _ ages _ \- it felt horrible. The fact that the air was horribly hot and dry didn’t help at all. It was, in fact, probably the reason why it felt so terrible.

 

Much like his lungs, his skin was burning too. It looked dry and red. Which told just how bad it was since his darker skin kind of hid some minor blemishes. Right now Lance could see how his chest, arms and shoulders were down right screaming red. It looked horrifying.

 

Lance’s breathing wasn’t calming down at all. With each passing second and with each new notion Lance found from his body the panic was setting in stronger and stronger. It squeezed his chest and heart, made his vision tunnel, made his whole body tremble as he tried to gasp for breath. His body was demanding some kind of breathing but air wasn’t helping at all. It just hurt more!

 

His body moved a little so that he could emerge his head under water. Snapping his mouth shut and forcing his gills to work even though they screamed in protest. They were dry and there was salt and dirt on them. The water was disgustingly warm and dirty. It was all wrong. But he forced himself to do it. Because it was water. It was water, his body needed water. Oh god he needed so much more water. Cool water. Space to move. Darkness. There wasn’t any of that here.

 

Being submerged made the thumping beat of his heart even louder in his ears. His body was still in full panic mode and it wasn’t settling down. He was trembling with the urge to swim - to escape. But he couldn’t. He was trapped.

 

He was trapped.

 

Oh God he was trapped. Hewastrappedhewastrappedhewastrapped. He couldn’t get away. He couldn’t move. He was lost and he was going to burn alive in this shallow pool of water.

  
  


Lance wished he could somehow calm himself down but God, he just couldn’t. The panicked state continued to grip him tight, making his every muscle tense. Making his whole body hurt even  _ more _ . 

 

It was torture.

 

And it just kept continuing and continuing. His heart beating way too fast and gills working over time. His whole body going overdrive for so long as there continued to be energy.

 

Was it minutes? Or hours? Or days? How ever long it actually was didn’t really matter since it felt like forever before sweet sweet release of unconsciousness gripped him.

 

Lance welcomed the blackness with open arms.

 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   
  


 

The next time Lance woke up, he remained calm. Mostly because his body was just too exhausted to panic anymore. He had also somewhere during his unconsciousness learned to take more of an objective point of thinking what was happening.

 

It was cooler now, but not completely dark. Either the darkest point of the night was coming or it had already went. Lance feared - and regrettably even knew - that it had already been. The cruel sun was bound to pop up back into the sky sooner than Lance hoped it would.

 

His body felt even more horrible than before. What with the exhaustion, tension, burning skin and settling in injuries. Because ah, he had those too. Lance remembered the whirling of the water, the helplessness to control where the water took him and finally, the fall, the horrible horrible fall to the rock hard ground, which was the bottom of the death trap. Lance could feel the strongest aching on his hip and scratches around his body along with the burns. It all just hurt so much.

 

Lance lied there still, unmoving as possible, breathing with his lungs since the air was at least a bit more cooler now that the sun wasn’t heating it up. The problem with the kiddy pool he was trapped in was that there was no comfortable way for him to be completely under water. It was either his tail in full-length under water without twisting it painfully and his upper body sitting up above the surface, or his tail lifted above the surface to rest against the wall while his head was underwater. If he was on his side, his arm and hip would come above the surface. And if he twisted in any way to accommodate himself to the round shape of the pool, it would make the pain considerably worse. There was no best solution here.

 

Lance had already concluded that his earlier assumption was right. There was no way for him to escape. The only way out of the hole was to somehow climb up the wall and exit through the opening. But there was many reason as to why he couldn’t do that. Firstly, the walls were way too steep, with basically nothing to grab onto. Secondly, the climb was like 13 feet high. Thirdly, with his injuries? Not likely. Fourth…ly? Was there a word fourthly? Well fourthly, his tail weighed way too much for him to climb pretty much anything. Fifthly - that sounded way too wrong, there should be only three reasons on his list for this to sound sensible - even if he were to somehow magically make his way out of this hole, there was no way for him to know as to just how far off the ocean was from here. Lance knew it wasn’t just behind the wall, he should be able to hear and sense it if it were. It was probably in the seeing distance, but still far since even the smell of salt felt muted.

 

Concluding as a fact that there was no way for him to escape almost sent him into a another panic attack but he somehow managed to push it down. He was tense and his heart was beating fast but he was still at least breathing about correctly.

 

All in all - Lance felt utterly hopeless.

 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  
  


Lance had been right with the assumption that the sun would return sooner rather than later. That knowledge however didn’t soften the blow at all.

 

Lance kept thinking - how on earth could this become worse and worse by the minute? It constantly felt like no, this was the limit, it couldn’t feel any worse than this. Yet he kept tipping over those limits into new territories of pain.

 

As time went on, he became hungry. As more time went on, he became starving. The water he was breathing felt more and more suffocating the more it warmed up and the more he had breathed it in. After all, with it being the same stale water with little to no plants or other organisms in it, there was nothing to add more breathable oxygen to the water he was breathing. It was like being in a closed coffin with air getting thinner the more you breathed.

 

And so Lance had to breath with his lungs. But when he breathed with his lungs - it burned. And when his lungs burned, his skin burned even more. And since he was above the surface, the sun was also making his sunburn worse and worse by the second. Thus, making it burn even worse.

 

Lance was positive that eventually he would actually set aflame. He was going to burn to death.

 

Moving was especially painful. Yet Lance did it from time to time so different parts of his body could at least find the briefest of reliefs of getting under water.

 

He was going to die. The thought kept repeating more and more as time went on. He was going to burn alive. He was going to starve. He was going to die from the pain. Something - would eventually kill him. It was just a fact.

 

Part of Lance hoped it would happen already.

 

The other part still wanted to fight. To believe that there still was hope. Hope to what? Lance didn’t know. He just hoped that there still was hope.

 

Because he _wanted_ to live. He _wanted_ to survive. He wanted to swim. He wanted to see his family. He wanted to court someone and find a mate for life. He wanted to race. He wanted to explore. He wanted to live so so bad, but hope was slipping from his fingers faster than he could hold on to it.

 

There was a wet drop on his cheek and Lance lifted his hand to it in surprise. After all, his upper body was currently above water, where did the wet drop come from? He raised his eyes up but no, the sky was still clear blue with the horrible sun shining over him. Another wet drop slipped past his cheek.

 

Was it coming from him? Was he bleeding?

 

After more and more drops of water emerged, along with sobs, Lance finally realised that they were coming from his eyes. Oh God, he was bleeding from his eyes. Did this mean he was dying? Would he die now?

 

The drops just kept coming and coming even as Lance tried to stop them by pressing his hands to his eyes. His breathing was becoming hard and fast again and these sobs and horrible wailing noises were escaping his lips. It felt horrible. He felt so sad. He must be dying. He didn’t want to die!

 

Lance changed his position again, lifting his tail against the wall and pressing his head below water. Maybe he would stop bleeding under water?

 

It actually helped a little. Even with it’s low oxygen, the water felt so much better than the hars air. The quietness was a bit calming. The bleeding stopped.

 

The movement to get under water had flared up the pain in his body once more. After he had calmed down and the bleeding had stopped, Lance relaxed his hands along his sides and tried to relax for a moment. Maybe he could fall asleep if he tried hard enough? Unconsciousness seemed to be the most pain free time he could get right now.

 

Lance layed there for several moments completely still. After awhile he knew he wouldn’t fall asleep - he was much too awake and not exhausted enough yet to just pass out. But he stayed in the motionless position anyway. It was one of the most comfortable ones. Not to say it was comfortable but at least more pain less.

 

But then something made him stir. A shadow dimmed the world for a fleeting second and Lance saw it even with his eyes closed. The momentary shadow made his eyes snap open and look up. Through the slightly vision blurring water Lance could see something new on the edge of the hole. Something that wasn’t there before.

 

Before Lance knew it, he had lifted himself up to sitting position once again and blinked his vision clear to see as to what exactly this new thing was.

 

A person.

 

There was a dark skinned boy on the edge of the hole looking down at him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha, I'm obsessed with notes and comments XD I got a whopping 3 kudos on the first chapter and I thank those three persons. I'm definitely not surprised because it only had 400+ words, I know I don't click on fics if they have that little words myself either and how can you really know if a fic is good enough to give kudos to after just 400+ words? After you give your kudos your left with the message "You already left kudos here :)" FOREVER! 
> 
> Now you have a little more words and I hope that maybe you now have figured out whether or not this fic is kudos or comment worthy? I'm not saying I'll be more motivated to write if I get them but haha I'm totally saying that, guilt is what makes me do things, eventually.

**Author's Note:**

> And I have joined the Mer!Lance AU, because I love that AU. So f*cking much. 
> 
> Kudos and comments feed my motivation to write just fyi. Plus they make me smile and they make my day soooo much better<3


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